By Kavita Mistry 
Last Tuesday (October 28, 2025), before the sun had risen over Rio de Janeiro’s low hills, two favelas (shantytowns) on the city’s northern fringe were surrounded by heavily-armed troops as their armoured cars growled through narrow lanes and bursts of gunfire rattled the red-brick dwellings. The operation against the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) gang, which controls the city’s drug trade, lasted for hours.
By afternoon, the favelas had turned into a war zone — smoke billowed from cars burning in the streets, bodies lay in side alleys, and an acrid haze swept through the sprawl where residents hid in their tiny homes. By the time fingers were lifted from the triggers of automatic rifles, 64 people — including four police officers — lay dead. Within hours, Rio de Janeiro’s governor Cláudio Castro appeared before cameras, hailing the operation as a “great success,” even as Brazil erupted in debate over its purpose and cost.
The next morning, some favela residents went up the forested hills on the edge of their community. It was a scene of horror: dozens of bodies lay scattered in the bushes — many shirtless young men shot in the head, others with their throats slit, and one decapitated body with its head dangling from a tree. By day’s end, volunteers had carried the bodies to the favela’s main square, where desperate women searched for their sons, brothers, and husbands. “We brought down a total of 80 bodies with our own hands. We asked residents to bring sheets, towels or anything they had to help with the removals,” said Erivelton Correa, president of the community association, which represents the working-class and poor who live in these densely-packed areas.
Officially the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s history, which left 121 people dead, including 115 alleged gang members with another 113 arrested, has split Brazil on political — and class — lines. A survey on Friday found that 57% of Rio citizens approved of the operation, calling it a necessary response to drug violence, while 38% condemned it as brutal. While Rio governor hailed the operation as a victory against crime, hundreds of favela residents have marched through the alleys, carrying photos of the dead and chanting, “It wasn’t a war, it was a massacre.”
Such police raids are nothing new in Rio. The city’s history is replete with operations against drug gangs, which always leave behind a pile of corpses.
This time the operation has turned into a major political flashpoint as Brazil is about to enter an important election year. As the Rio governor defended his operation as a strike against what he called “narcoterrorism” — echoing rhetoric from Washington DC — critics dismissed his move as cynical politics from a leader facing sliding popularity and a court case that could bar him from public office. But Castro, who has seen a small boost in his ratings since Tuesday, has formed a “Peace Consortium” with five other right-wing governors to “take on narcoterrorism” in Brazil.
It’s hard to miss the timing of the operation and the words chosen by Rio’s governor and his fellow travellers on the Right. Coming just as President Lula da Silva announced his plan to run for president again in 2026, the language of “war on narcoterrorism” has sparked suspicion. With Lula leading in all polls and former president Jair Bolsonaro sidelined by convictions for attempting a coup, the president’s allies on the Left see the Rio operation as an attempt to shift the spotlight from the Lula government’s achievements to its alleged softness on crime. “The consortium that the governors have announced is not a peace consortium — it’s Trump’s consortium. They want to stir up foreign intervention,” said Guilherme Boulos, federal minister of the Presidential Secretariat in Brasilia.
There is a history to this criticism. In May, Brazil rebuffed pressure from the US to label the Red Command and PCC, another major criminal group, as terrorist organizations — rejecting a Trump administration’s push to link Latin American gangs to immigration and security threats. With the US navy ship now lurking in the Caribbean waters and Venezuelan boats being blown up almost daily, the specter of “narcoterrorism” has taken on a new meaning for Brazil –and the whole region. A day after the Rio operation, Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski made the Brazilian government’s stance clear: “Terrorism always involves an ideological element — it’s a political action, with social repercussions…Criminal factions, on the other hand, systematically commit crimes defined under the Penal Code. It’s very easy to identify what constitutes a criminal faction,” he said in Rio as Governor Castro looked on.
The Lula government might have put its foot down on the issue of narcoterrorism, but it certainly has come under pressure to act against organized crime. On Friday, President Lula signed the Anti-Faction Bill, designed to strengthen the state’s power to dismantle criminal organizations that control territories and economic activities. The proposal will go to the National Congress for an urgent review. Signing the bill, Lula said fighting criminal groups was a top priority of his government. “We will show how to confront these factions that survive by exploiting the poorest people in this country,” he declared.
From now till next year’s elections, Lula faces the delicate task of asserting his authority on organised crime without hurting the poor or upsetting the urban middle class, and without surrendering the narrative to the so-called “peace consortium.” Analysts believe the opposition might have played their hand too early. “If there’s a silver lining in the tragedy, it’s that the right-wing may have moved too fast. By revealing its strategy early, it has given Lula and the pro-democracy coalition time to craft a counteroffensive,” said Miguel de Rosário, a Rio-based political commentator.
With the new anti-crime bill, Lula is seeking to regain control of the security narrative — even as his government bets that low inflation and rising wages would appeal more than fear in next year’s election.